The complete idiot's guide to classical music (6 page)

We were talking earlier about instruments each producing a different sound. They can also produce different emotions. The harp is often used to suggest angelic serenity, for instance, and the trumpet to evoke martial calls to battle. The trumpet can also be gentle, of course, and the harp obsessive, if that’s how the composer so chooses, which is another thing that makes classical music so fascinating and unpredictable.

Tempo (the speed of the music) is another way to evince mood. When a piece evolves with slowly shifting harmonies, it’s safe to say that the composer was not thinking of euphoric celebrations; when the music races along with an exciting clatter of sound, it’s probably not portraying sadness or grief. Many other elements can similarly allow listeners to share the composer’s dramatic intent. Is the music harmonious or dissonant (harsh sounding), loud or soft, quiet or boisterous? Do the themes proceed in an orderly fashion or bounce around a lot?

 
Important Things to Know
Allowing yourself to become part of the composer’s emotional world involves more than distinguishing sad from happy sounds. You have to let the music permeate your own being, let yourself be transported into a virtual environment of sound.

When people speak of being “moved” by music, you know they were engaged in active listening. Even if you don’t understand the German words, it’s hard to imagine hearing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” without becoming involved in the musical message, feeling uplifted in mind and spirit. Ditto hearing Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
without being aware of its high eroticism, or the B Minor Mass without sensing Bach’s abiding religious faith.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
You can’t fool the critics when it comes to eroticism. More than a century before self-appointed guardians of the public morals were trying to save us from rock lyrics, a London critic wrote that “the story [of Wagner’s
Siegfried
] is a chaotic mass of filth. Any half-hour of it would make you blush if you had a face on you as hard as a bronze statue.”

In the old days of 12-inch LPs, liner notes were easy to read; now, assuming you can pry the booklet out of its plastic prison without destroying the cover, the tiny size of the page and print can lead to eyestrain. However tempting, though, don’t skip the notes: Usually they contain extremely helpful information about the work you’re about to hear, and the artists who created it.

That’s not always the case, naturally. Every so often, you’ll find notes that are pretentious, obscure, or so technically oriented as to be useless for normal people like you and me. In that case, you have our permission to use the booklet for kindling, and turn instead to any one of many fine books on the composer in the case. (You’ll find a list of recommended volumes in Appendix A.) But first give the writer the benefit of the doubt. Most often, he or she will convey a genuine understanding of the music and not just be out to impress you with erudite, pompous, and often irrelevant phraseology.

A good stereo needn’t cost a year’s salary and have speakers that dwarf Pavarotti in size. On the other hand, you do want to hear all of the qualities we’ve been discussing thus far. If your system can’t reproduce sounds accurately, you can’t fully partake of the musical meal being presented to you. If you don’t hear the bass notes, if the loud passages are distorted, if there’s a hum or other noise not intended by composer or performer, the listening experience is degraded.

One friend of ours wondered why his CD of organ music was silent for the first minute of the first piece. After all, it wasn’t a tape with an unusually long leader. Upon upgrading his system, he discovered that the “silence” was, in fact, a deep organ pedal point that simply was inaudible on the lesser equipment. If your Beethoven is coming from a boombox, rest assured that you are coping with lost notes, textures, and musical dissatisfaction.

The easy way to acquire decent sound is to buy a prepackaged system, often including a cabinet. Rarely will it include topnotch equipment, but it’s a start. Better, though still a compromise, is to buy a stereo receiver—a combination AM/FM tuner, preamplifier and amplifier in one unit—plus a separate CD player and speakers. The third (and best) method is to purchase individual components, matching them to each other in quality, and being guided by your own personal listening tastes.

Computer mavens like to talk about “garbage in, garbage out,” and that’s a good motto when you’re buying hi-fi equipment, too. Resist the temptation to chintz on the amplifier or CD player and splurge on the speakers, because the front-end quality is far more critical. Remember that it all starts with the musical information on the recording: If the CD player can’t decode that audio signal completely, or the amplifier fails to reproduce it properly, the best speakers in the world can’t recall those lost details. In fact, high quality speakers connected to an inferior system will simply magnify the defects, and therefore actually sound worse than cheaper speakers. You’re playing a matching game here, so if you buy expensive speakers, you have to equip them with electronics worthy of their unique qualities.

The cost of audiophile quality systems knows no bounds—you can buy a Mercedes for what a pair of some speakers will set you back—but, as audio expert Robert Harley puts it, “a carefully chosen and well set-up system of moderate price will always outperform a more expensive, less carefully chosen and set-up system.” Other wise and whimsical Harleyisms: “a sonic improvement is meaningful only if it has musical significance; the less you think about the sound, the more you enjoy the music; and being an audiophile shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying music anytime and anywhere—even when reproduced by a clock radio.”

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
For a mere $89,200, you can buy an amplifier that has 21 pounds of silver wound into transformers by hand through a microscope, and a for another pittance of $25,000, a loudspeaker that stands 6½ feet tall and weighs 530 pounds.

A good way to begin your stereo education is to leaf through
Audio
,
Stereo Review
,
Stereophile
,
Fi
,
Listener
, and other publications devoted to music and sound. An excellent book on the subject is Laura Dearborn’s
Good Sound
, which quite lives up to its subtitle as “An Uncomplicated Guide to Choosing and Using Audio Equipment.”

Then visit a shop that specializes in high-fidelity components, as opposed to those bargain-basement electronics stores, which usually are staffed by equipment-pushers rather than audio experts. Most reputable dealers will have listening rooms where you can sample a great number of components and hear various equipment combinations. It’s a good idea to bring along a favorite recording, too, since it will give you a better basis for comparisons.

According to Michael Riggs, editor of
Audio
magazine, you can expect to pay a minimum of $1,000 to receive adequate sound if you choose to go with the receiver. Adding another $1,000 on the component route will provide a substantial improvement in sonic quality and stereo imaging. If you decide it’s time to become a real audiophile, your system will cost a minimum of $5,000. For audiophile quality sound systems, the sky is the limit—although for most of us mortals there are some financial constraints. Still, you should consider it as a long-term investment just as you do your furniture.

 
Warning
A word of caution: Make sure the store has a liberal return and exchange policy. The sound in a demonstration room may be quite different from that in your home, which has different dimensions, not to mention furniture, drapes, and carpets that could well affect the sound. Since you’ll be doing your listening in your room, not the store’s, it might take a bit of stereo swapping before you get the setup just right.

You can get a good stereo receiver for $500 to $750. Good quality means that your receiver has a minimum amplifier power of 100 watts per channel and low distortion. Some receivers have 200 watts per channel or more and can sell for upwards of $1,000. For a CD player, the minimum investment is $300. It’s true that prices are dropping; a few years ago a mediocre CD player cost $500 or more. But if you’re really looking for optimum sound, don’t be tempted by bargain equipment: Remember, the CD player is the heart of your system if you play CDs regularly.

If you have only $100 to spend, don’t despair—you can still hear most of the music on a good portable table radio—but it won’t be hi-fi. You will miss the subleties but you will hear most of what the composer wanted you to hear. An excellent hi-fi quality stereo table radio is made by Bose and sells for about $350 by mail order (800-444-2673). You can connect a CD player to it later on.

As thrilling as the sound may be on a high-priced system in a perfectly designed listening room (which rarely describes your home, anyway), it’s still only an approximation of the acoustical qualities of an actual performance. Every time something comes between you and the original sound—whether it’s the microphone in the studio, the encoding of the digital information on the CD, the feeding of that information through the audio equipment—something is lost. If you want to hear sound at its best, you have to hear it “live” in the concert hall.